But if you’re going to use content marketing to promote your products and services, then you should do it with a strategic approach.

Most people make the mistake of not having a proper content marketing planLisa Fotios

Most companies that I see, don’t really know why they’re creating content. All they know is that it’s good for search engines and it brings people to their website. So they get stuck creating more and more content just to have additional content on their site. They’re creating content for the sake of creating content.

But content really needs to be created with an overall plan in mind. If you do that you can literally build a business on that strategy alone.

Here’s How Companies Have Used Interesting Content Marketing

Content marketing has been around for hundreds of years. Benjamin Franklin first published the yearly release of ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’ in 1732. The idea was to promote his printing business so this was a great example of using content to market a business.

Here are some of the more notable examples of content marketing I’ve seen.

The Michelin Restaurant Guide

You’ve likely heard about restaurants that receive up to three Michelin stars. The awarded stars can often make or break a restaurant.

But did you know the Michelin Restaurant Guide was created by the Michelin Tyre Company? Yes, that same tyre company that has the ‘Michelin Man’, made of tyres.

The Michelin brothers first produced the guide in 1900.

The guide reviewed restaurants out in the French countryside. They also provided useful information like maps, tyre repair and replacement instructions, car mechanics listings, hotels, and petrol stations throughout France.

Of course, the guide mentioned restaurants in the countryside so that readers would have to drive to them.

The overall content marketing strategy behind the guide was to encourage more people to buy cars and therefore, spend more money on tyres.

Television ‘Soap Operas’

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, Proctor & Gamble (P&G) were making soap and a whole host of other household products, aimed at housewives.

As radio and television grew, P&G knew that their target audience were often listening to the radio or watching television during the daytime. The housewives were closely following the serial dramas that were being broadcast at the time. They were very popular.

P&G soon started sponsoring these dramas. Later on, their content marketing strategy saw them making their own daytime dramas for television.

With the perfect target audience tuned in, they would include blatant promotions for their own household products within the storylines of these dramas too.

The obvious connection between this form of daytime entertainment with household cleaning goods led to them being called ‘soap operas’.

Today P&G make tens of billions of dollars a year and sells its products all around the world.

The Guinness Book Of Records

In 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery went on a shooting trip. After missing a shot, he and his friends had an argument about the fastest game bird in Europe. They couldn’t find an answer in any reference book (and of course, search engines hadn’t been invented yet).

In 1954, he remembered that trip and had the idea for a Guinness promotion that would help to settle similar pub arguments, that surely took place all around the world. He wanted to create a book of facts to help to settle these arguments, which he thought would be valuable.

He had a London fact-finding agency put the content marketing promotion together. When it was compiled, they gave away a thousand copies. It was so popular that they bound an official copy of The Guinness Book of Records in August 1955. It went to the top of the British best seller lists by Christmas.

Today, Guinness World Records is sold in 100 different countries and 37 languages. It’s the world's bestselling copyrighted book ever.

So, next time you’re thinking of putting together a content marketing strategy, keep these in mind. You never know, you could copy the above business success secrets and also produce your next big win.